4 Stocks With Institutional Buying And Nods From Oppenheimer

With the markets feeling a bit blue this week, its a good time to find stocks that have had the [...]

With the markets feeling a bit blue this week, its a good time to find stocks that have had the backing of major institutions. In this list we screened for US-traded equities that have two major positive trends.

Analyst Ratings

We then screened the stocks for “buy” or “overweight” ratings from reputable analysts at Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer & Co. is one of the most recognizable boutique investment firms. An “outperform” rating from them means that the investment professionals believe these stocks have more upside to capture. Some of these stocks were last assessed much earlier in the year. Buy ratings from the beginning of 2012 may have been catalysts for the stocks to trend upward.

Ratings may not change if the stock hasn’t fully realized its target price or if the fundamentals continue to look strong. There may be products in a company’s pipeline that aren’t fully priced in among other developments through the year.

Here are ratings from analysts across different firms for the stocks in the list below:

Institutional Buying

To affirm the strength of the companies in this list are the actions of institutions. Because institutional investors handle such large amounts of money, it is easy enough to assume that they know what they’re doing — or at the very least know more than the average investor. This is why these investors are also sometimes referred to as “smart money.”

If institutional investors start investing in a company, regular investors can assume that some of the most talented analysts and money managers expect the company’s share prices to increase over time. The stocks on our list are experiencing significant investment from big money.

Here’s the list:

1. Akamai Technologies, Inc. ( AKAM, Earnings, Analysts, Financials): Provides services for accelerating and improving the delivery of content and applications over the Internet in the United States and internationally. Market cap at $6.34B, most recent closing price at $35.73. On 10/25/2012, Oppenheimer had a Outperform rating on the stock. Net institutional purchases in the current quarter at 10.0M shares, which represents about 5.76% of the company’s float of 173.74M shares.